The first thing to be said about this concept – and we’re going to keep this short and focused – is that it’s not fundamentally about the debacle in Beirut in 1983 or about the “Samantha Power” Doctrine of “responsibility to protect.”
By far the most important thing to be said is that the purpose is to thwart Israel in Gaza.
This isn’t enacting the pie-in-the-sky Power Doctrine. This is a serious armed power move against Israel.
The purpose is to subject whatever Israel wants to do in Gaza to an outside veto backed by armed force.
The target is Israel. The purpose is not a foolish ideological purpose. It’s a standard-issue use of armed force to prevent Israel from achieving a better security settlement for itself in Gaza. It’s a proposal to occupy Gaza with a purportedly “neutral” armed force, so that Israel doesn’t have a free hand in achieving sustainable security conditions there.
Please reread that until all extraneous, obfuscating ideas have been chased out by it. Nothing else is really worth talking about. Yes, it would be a stupid move for the U.S., especially to involve our own troops in it. The Politico report indicates that’s not the going-in proposition, but we can all have our varying degrees of cynicism about that. The possibility of another October in Beirut – this time in Gaza – is certainly there.
The Biden administration may clutter the project up with vague, Samantha Power-type appeals to putting force behind humanitarian objectives. That’s likely, in fact, because it would get people to waste time talking about whether that’s necessary or would work, etc.
But the point that matters is that this move is intended to plaster Gaza with third parties whom Israel doesn’t dare to put at risk.
We already know what the result would be. As night follows day, a “peacekeeping” force would end up being cover for a creeping return of Iran-backed militias to Gaza. UNRWA – not a peacekeeping force, but certainly up to the job – has provided such cover for Hamas for years.
And UNIFIL in southern Lebanon has effectively filled the same function for Hezbollah – not as much, perhaps, through actively cooperating with the terrorists (i.e., not in the same way as UNRWA and Hamas), but certainly by staying Israel’s hand against Hezbollah in Lebanon, to Israel’s disadvantage.
I warned about the Biden administration’s desire to create such a compromised situation for Israel in previous analysis of the Gaza pier project (also here). The purpose of the Gaza pier is to establish a hook for U.S. involvement in, and an effective veto over, Israel’s plans for Gaza.
I warned of the same concern in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October attack last fall. The collateral, earlier move of “urgently” settling the maritime boundary with Lebanon created an instrument with U.S. interest signaled, essentially depending on U.S. guarantees of Lebanon’s behavior. The Biden administration follows in Obama’s footsteps in wanting to create such situations and instruments, because what we later do about them can and will be framed in the terms of a veto against Israel’s desires or intent.
The biggest such move since the Second Intifada was the Obama/Kerry proposal in Obama’s second term for a multilateral “peacekeeping” force in Judea and Samaria to take the place of the IDF. Israel wisely showed no inclination to make any sacrifices of security conditions to implement a proposal of that kind. It went by the wayside as prolonged negotiations set in.
But it was pushed initially by the Obama administration, and the ensuing negotiations became a lightning rod for numerous jolts to Israel from “leaked” accusations and criticisms that were evidently designed to undermine Israel’s posture. The passive-aggressive hostility to Israel in the “information” realm was similar to today’s.
It has been evident from the earliest days of the current war that the Biden administration wants to come out of this with a hook in Gaza. The U.S. didn’t have one before, and the UN hook, UNRWA, has been unarmed and formally humanitarian. To truly impede Israel in Gaza, there has to be an armed force of some kind. It has to be one empowered to counterpose armed force, so that IDF moves against security threats in Gaza can at any time instantly be framed as “escalations.”
The funny thing about this is that it is so indisputably manifest from everything else that happens daily throughout the region that the factors I describe here are the ones in play, and will produce the outcome I depict. Yet observers continue to speak in terms of mal-focused, conventional, old-consensus assumptions about patterns and motives.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah and Hamas are clearly longstanding specimens of Iran-backed militias. The ones in Iraq, post-Saddam, are latecomers. The Iraqi militias in Syria are latecomers. The Houthis are latecomers. It’s all the same basic pattern.
Often, U.S. policy in this context has effects in opposition to our stated goals and interests. In Lebanon, for example, our support to the Lebanese government and armed forces serves in multiple ways to empower Hezbollah.
In Iraq, the U.S. spent several years in the mid-2010s taking the side of Iran-backed militias “against ISIS.” Our air and artillery support assisted Iran in gaining control of territory in Iraq by driving out ISIS. The same was true in parts of Syria.
We performed that function “multilaterally,” in concert with coalition partners like Qatar and the UK.
In Syria circa 2014-2015, Obama put U.S. troops in Syria supposedly as a means of creating safe havens for refugees, while the actual operational purpose was acting as a sidekick and broker for Syrian rebel factions and Kurds, which were prosecuting their own interests against the Assad regime. Again, coalition partners like Qatar and Turkey were significant actors; as in Iraq, they shaped the objectives being served on a kind of unguided swivel by the American forces. All this was couched in terms of “degrading ISIS.”
The upshot of all such strategies in the region has been to preserve a brittle stasis into which Iran keeps inserting itself more and more. The argument for why the U.S. would pursue this course is a separate one. The point is that nothing would give us confidence it would be any different this time.
It might be possible, with innovative thinking, to back a Gaza plan involving the Abraham Accords partners, one that respected Israel’s security interests as paramount. Such a proposal should not be turned over on any standard model to the UN. Nor should Qatar have any outsized involvement in it. I would want to see the Emiratis and Saudis in the lead. Another obvious and necessary participant would be Egypt.
But Israel has no basis for thinking a revamped Obama/Kerry proposal, tooled to spec for Gaza, would be anything other than a channel for hostile multilateral incursions on Israel’s security decisions. Linking such an entity for Gaza with the West Bank and the peremptory creation of a “Palestinian state” – an unceasing refrain of the Biden administration – makes it clear where this would be going. It would be particularly undesirable in Gaza because Gaza has open access to the sea.
This was foreseeable from the beginning, and here it is, being floated for impact in the information battlespace. Yes, Team Biden wants to undermine an Israeli operation in Rafah, but that’s not an end in itself. The ultimate end is creating an entry point for decisive U.S. influence over how Israel handles its own security. The establishment Democrats have been angling for this for more than a decade.
Feature image: President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu confer in Israel in October 2023. C-SPAN video.
The Optimistic Conservative 
If I were Israeli I’d be concerned.
Trump tried to give the them a warning a few days ago. He told them to finish up and look for peace. Moreover, the US abstention at the Security Council may have opened the gate to a fundamental change of US policy concerning the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
The Israelis better come up with something, even their friends are finding it difficult to support them at this point.